Word: pashto
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...first mosque at Norfolk Navy Base in Virginia. The Pentagon is eager for the language skills of Muslims, and has been awarding signing bonuses and expedited citizenship (for the two-thirds of enlistees who are legal aliens) since 2003 to recruits fluent in Arabic, Dari, Farsi, Kurdish and Pashto. (The Army's website, in its typically patriotic but omnisciently weird way, declares these 450 new soldiers - all sent to Afghanistan, Iraq or the Horn of Africa - "100% support the Global War on Terrorism.") During Ramadan, fast-breaking dinners are regularly held at the Pentagon and other military installations. Because Muslims...
...think you have the tools to provide all this? We can always use more tools. The first and foremost is, if they offered me a choice between two more divisions or 1,000 people who spoke Pashto and Dari and had a passion for this place, I would absolutely take the 1,000. Actually, I'd even take 500 over those two divisions. Because that is the leverage here. It's the people who understand the situation. It's not blunt instruments that work. You do need some straight military boots on the ground, numbers to provide...
Operation Khanjar - Pashto for "dagger" - is the first test of the Obama Administration's new strategy for Afghanistan. No longer treated as a concern secondary to Iraq, the Afghanistan theater will see the number of American soldiers serving there increase by 17,000 by this fall. And under McChrystal, they'll be waging a different kind of war. Limited troop availability in the past meant that while NATO forces could clear an area of insurgents, they were unable to hold the terrain. Now the plan is for the Marines to set up combat posts in villages to provide the residents...
...last time I saw Sherzai, who is an accomplished lyricist, he was belting out a newly written ode in Pashto to the Taliban in the domed atrium of his Baroque governor's palace. A turbaned Pavarotti with a deep voice burnished by years of cigarettes, he put one hand on his heart and, with the other raised in a beseeching manner, chastised his enemies. "Once, we stood side by side fighting for our country/ Leave me some pride in those memories/ Your worth is more than in killing yourself/ You slaughter your brother while calling out God's name/ Come...
...behest of Musharraf, decided to negotiate with militants. The administration embraced the peace effort in the hope that diplomacy would succeed where force had failed. Perhaps over time the accords would have worked. Says Ayaz Wazir, a former Pakistani ambassador who hails from Waziristan: "We have a saying in Pashto [the local language], that if you fight for 100 years, on the last day you will again sit around the table and find a solution. So why not just start...